Josh Mack blogging at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, and occasionally on; bicycles, politics, Brooklyn, parenting, crafts, and good reading. Currently helping to build a new NYC neighborhood news site - nearsay.com, that celebrates the voices that make our city. Subscribe to the daily newsletter it gives you what you need to know.

A site that abridges articles from the New Yorker, The Economist. I was going to start something a few years ago in newsletter form that did something like this. Wanted to give people the ability to seem brighter than they were at cocktail parties. Need to think about whether I would seek this site out. Still think I'd prefer a newsletter digest.

October 30, 2007

My good friend Dave Wondrich, who happens to be one of the foremost cocktail experts (hence a reason he is a good friend) and a Professor in both the senses of the word, has a fantastic new book out next week called Imbibe. It is a combination of a history of a amazing age and a guide to recreating authentic cocktails that pulls from and enhances the work of the original Professor of the bar Jerry Thomas. The author of the first cocktail book and a keen member of the sporting life Thomas lived and worked in NY, SF, Virgina City, and spots in between. The book covers the gold rush, the reasons for Georgia having peaches, and interesting tales of the sporting life. The cocktail part enables you to adopt measures, make syrups and bitters, flaming drinks, punches (I can attest to their potency and find myself thankful that the Navy no longer presses people) and generally travel back in time to great cocktails which you will be happy to imbibe. And since glasses were smaller back then you can have more of them.

Apple is offering 52 weeks of personal computer instruction for $99 a year. Several older people I know are now using this. One is now e-mailing thus freeing her son from faxing her messages, another is now on DSL and toting a laptop. Pretty fantastic stuff. UPDATE : as they get more adept the usual mix of petitions and alert mails they send is now likely to be augmented by Jib Jab and You Tube videos, so I may have to reconsider.

October 29, 2007

"The accused was holding the bike and moving his hips back and forth as if to simulate sex."...He is not the first man to be convicted of a sexual offence involving an inanimate object, however...Karl Watkins, an electrician, was jailed for having sex with pavement." (tags: newscycling)

translate apps and this nugget - "go through a bookstore and look at the covers of every magazine. If any of the demographics being targeted by the magazines aren’t currently served (or are underserved) on Facebook, go build an application that targets this niche." (tags: facebookapplications)

October 24, 2007

In this day and age when many older things seem new again, the announcement that CondeNast has invested in a company called Tastebook, which enables users to create custom cookbooks took me back to a now defunct company called Booktailor which enabled users to create custom travel guides in 2000. That company funded by Bertelsmann and then shut down.

October 23, 2007

avc.blogs.com has a graph of his last.fm music choices for the past year. It appears in a beautiful audiowave like graph. This is a link to the blog of the programmer behind it. nice thoughts on data visualization

October 19, 2007

This morning we found a dead bird on our deck. My immediate thought was to call 311 where I was told that if I wanted to file a "complaint" about a possible case of West Nile virus, it would take two business days. I was also given instructions on how to dispose of the bird. I chose the latter, but as I was putting it into the garbage bag it turned over and had the most extraordinary beak. Immediately we got out the Sibley and I (in retrospect ignoring the sizing info) identified it as something like a Hudsonian Godwit or a Bristle-Thighed Curlew. Armed with that exciting info we decided to call the Prospect Park Audubon Center who asked us to send these photos to their Chief Naturalist. He identified it as an American Woodcock (Scolopax minor), an upland shorebird (basically a
sandpiper that is adapted for a forest habitat). They migrate overland and sadly are particularly prone to colliding with windows. Poor bird.

My friend Francine has started posting lyrics and the backstory of old songs. For anyone who listens to Danny Stiles on NPR this is a blog for you. today she features "Going to sit right down and write myself a letter..." wish she would add mp3s

"eBay Neighborhoods is, really, a social network powered by commodity fetishism, a development that might horrify the critical theory scholars but is in fact a natural outgrowth of what eBay has been doing all along. At its peak, eBay was more than an auc

"Zittrain ... that Facebook is a closed system a la Compuserve, and he walked through some of the more onerous aspects of Facebook's terms of service....Microsoft's approach to its developers seems, in comparison, remarkably open. He also called on a vari

October 15, 2007

Shalom Auslander wrote a very funny essay about the experience of wearing a Thom Browne. suit as an assignment. It appeared in the past weekend's NYT Magazine about wealth and NYC. Thom Browne. is also responsible for the Black Fleece line at Brooks Brothers which Auslander should try next as I'd love his take on wearing a cape and knickers. Other must reads in that issue are Daphne Merkin's essay in the back and James Traub's Measures of Wealth.

IMHO no. I think the addition of comments is a nice idea but would rather see the # of comments appear on the articles. Really didn't like the appearance of an idiotic comment right below the Headline that Gore had won the Nobel Prize. Gave a Fox like sla